You Aren't the Problem; Your Burnout Is
| Publication year | 2023 |
| Pages | 04 |
President’s Message
by J. Ryann Peyton
Well, it's been three years—a full 1,095 days since our world was thrust into a "new normal" of mask wearing, booster shots, home schooling, remote working, global anxiety, and economic instability. I'm tired. Honestly, I'm exhausted. While the early days of the pandemic now feel like some fictional, dystopian drama to be binge watched on Netflix, the reality of what we've collectively experienced these past thousand days has left many of us just plain empty.
How Are You?
How's it going holding up your family, your clients, your community, and yourself? If your legs are starting to wobble under the weight of the last three years, you're not alone. That fatigue you are feeling is real. I see you.
A word I've been hearing a lot recently from colleagues, mentees, mentors, and leaders in the legal profession is "burnout."
Burnout is the state of mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion of the human body caused by an excessive amount of stress.[1] While the concept of burnout isn't new, the pandemic created a new kind of burnout, introducing chronic stressors into nearly every facet of our lives. In a 2021 survey of 1,500 US workers, more than half said they were feeling burned out as a result of their job demands, and a whopping 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs in December 2021 in what has come to be known as the "great resignation."[2] Following the great resignation, a new burnout trend emerged in 2022, known as "quiet quitting"—the idea that people aren't going above and beyond at work and are instead just meeting their job description—and gained traction with at least 50% of the US workforce.[3] Today, the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is now 1.8 to 1, the lowest in almost a decade.[4]The reason for this disengagement? People are simply burned out and worn down.[5]
Although we may all be feeling a shared sense of burnout, the feeling doesn't manifest itself the same way for everyone. Let me tell you what my burnout looks like: It looks like a limited attention span where I can't persist through challenging projects for more than five- to ten-minute chunks of time. It looks like barely washed dishes and undone laundry because physical rest and mentally "checking out" is all that my brain will let me think about on the weekends. It looks like forcing every last bit of energy into pulling myself together to put on real pants some days. It looks like a dust-covered fishing rod and an unused ski pass. This isn't all my burnout looks like. It also shows up as back-breaking pressure to do everything—be everything—because as a...
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